Google Could Be Bringing Machine Vision to Smartphones

Machine learning could soon be coming to mobile devices, if recently announced partnership between Google and chip manufacturer Movidius bears fruit. Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on giving computers the capability to recognise patterns in data based on rules learnt from previous sets of data. Think IBM’s Watson – the computer that won American game show Jeopardy. It can now diagnose cancer patients and has even created some not-bad-at-all recipes. This is also the technique that allows Facebook to recognise your face in photos. Most of these applications require a constant internet connection to send queries to server farms that perform the processing. This can become a restricting factor for people with limited data plans or in areas where there is no connectivity at all.…